Shake Day

At the school where I work, every Wednesday is "Shake Day" and one of the coffee shops on campus sells milkshakes for a dollar. I have no idea when the tradition started, but I can tell it's going to be a good day when they are serving mint chocolate chip milkshakes. You have you choice of sprinkles, whipped cream, or oreos, and let me tell you there is nothing better than sprinkles on a mint chocolate chip shake.

My brother is a senior at the university, and since he will be moving to San Francisco in the fall for his job, we have made a pact to spend more time together while we're still living in the same city. Shake Day has become our standing weekly date--we meet every Wednesday at noon and have a shake over my lunch hour.

Usually, the first fifteen or twenty minutes of our shake date look like this:

My brother staring at the computer. Me staring at my shake melting. Note the sprinkles!

I spend time staring at the back of my brother's computer while he finishes off whatever crazy project he's currently working on, then we have approximately sixty-seven seconds to talk and then he has to run off to another meeting because he has accidentally triple booked himself.

Today, however, it only took him about five minutes to "just send this one quick email" before we finally clinked plastic cups and started slurping down our shakes. We spend the hour catching up on the past week. I ask him about his classes, he asks me about work. We trade weekend plans (him: dinner at the fanciest restaurant in Chicago, followed by a swanky party thrown by a friend. Me: sitting on my couch watching Netflix with K.).

We met nearly every week during the fall quarter, and I am really happy we can keep up the tradition. I will never turn down an excuse for a shake, but most of all I love catching up with him. Before I know it, the year will be over and he'll be thousands of miles away. Even though there is nobody else in the world who can drive me crazy quite like he can, he's also one of my favorite people to hang out with.